The Summon Service™ Goes Live

Seattle, WA – July 11, 2009 Serials Solutions® announced the first commercial adoption of the revolutionary Summon™ web-scale discovery service at the American Library Association’s Annual conference in Chicago. Michigan’s Grand Valley State University Library will launch the Summon™ service for students and faculty, enabling single search-box access to the breadth of its collection – from books and videos to e-resources at the article level. 

“This is an extraordinarily proud moment for all us at Serials Solutions,” said Jane Burke, Vice-President, Serials Solutions.  “We believe in the Summon service’s ability to transform library service by addressing its most pressing need: a simple entry point to the vastness of their collections. What we’ve all been dreaming of is now a reality: one search box, one results screen, one path to the best, most credible content.” 

The Summon™ service aims to bring the researcher back to the library and provide a channel for greater return on the library’s content investment. Its simple, library-branded search box eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for their research, making library collections simple to use and understand.  Summon™ users enter their search term and the service returns a list of the physical and digital materials that are appropriate for them. From this relevancy-ranked list, they can click through to full-text articles, but also find the books, specialty research and bibliographic tools, and services that will propel their research. 

The Summon™ service was announced in January with Dartmouth College Library and Oklahoma State University Libraries as beta sites, along with content heavyweights ProQuest and Gale as key partners. In its six months of beta testing, the Summon™ service has added five global sites—University of Sydney, Claremont Colleges Library, University of Calgary, Western Michigan University, and University of Liverpool – partners in refining the service in its final stages of development. Initially tested with just librarians, both Dartmouth College Library and University of Liverpool have opened the service to faculty and students. 

Concurrent with beta testing, publishers and other contributors have rapidly signed on to the Summon™ service. ProQuest and Gale – aggregators contributing indexing of titles from 4,700 of their participating publishers – have been joined by hundreds of other contributors, including Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, and the Royal Society, as well as scores of scholarly publishers and university presses. Earlier this month, the momentum behind the Summon™ service grew as LexisNexis®, Publishing Technology – provider of the scholarly research platform IngentaConnect™ – and ISI Web of Science® joined the growing ranks of those whose content will be discovered through the service. The Summon service now includes more than 6,000 contributors with nearly half a billion records indexed in a single content store, enabling one search and true relevancy-ranked results. 

True to Serials Solutions tradition, the Summon™ service is designed with library needs in mind. It’s hosted, making it nearly effortless to implement and easy to support with low impact on library staff. It’s also built with an open API so that it can be integrated with existing library Web sites or campus systems. 

About Serials Solutions

Founded by a librarian for librarians in 2000, Serials Solutions is the global leader in E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) that serves more than 2,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions® KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase, is the foundation for Serials Solutions® 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution. Serials Solutions recently introduced the Summon™ unified discovery service, a revolutionary discovery tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search.

Serials Solutions also is the exclusive source for Ulrichsweb.com™ and Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™ worldwide, and represents the AquaBrowser Library® unified discovery interface in the academic market in North America. The WebFeat® federated search service recently acquired by ProQuest soon will be incorporated into the Serials Solutions family of access and discovery services.

Serials Solutions provides fast implementation, easy customization, and outstanding value to libraries throughout the world.

Serials Solutions is a business unit of ProQuest LLC.

LexisNexis® is a registered trademark of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
IngentaConnect is a trademark of Publishing Technology plc.
ISI Web of Science® is a registered trademark of THOMSON REUTERS (SCIENTIFIC) INC.